9/12/26 Saturday 6 am
How ’bout this!
A little pink on the screen. This is radar-indicated frozen precipitation. At what level? I can’t tell. I know that at 9,800 feet, temps are in the mid-40s. I also know that there is a remote backcountry location at 11,675 feet (Opus Hut), where it is currently 39 degrees.
Rain accumulations around Telluride so far are between 0.30 and 0.45″. Good slow mover. I saw it overnight coming over from Utah, pretty cool.
Everywhere else, dew points are creeping into the low 40s. Models show this shower activity around Telluride, subsiding, then restarting; you can see a thunderstorm complex developing northwest of Telluride. Models are horrible at this setup; they all missed the moderate accumulations that have fallen so far. So low confidence in the forecast for the rest of the day up there.
A slightly better chance of showers developing elsewhere this afternoon. But a slightly better chance is still pretty low. Same story during the day on Sunday: slightly better, but chances increase into the late afternoon and evening. As we wait for a PAC NW trough to drop, moisture will continue to deepen.
My current take is that, unlike last week, there will be enough moisture for proper top-down saturation, which would likely produce stratiform showers (as opposed to thunderstorms).
Here is a side-by-side showing the consensus between European and GFS models showing widespread shower coverage on Monday morning.
Fingers crossed!
Models immediately diverge by late Monday evening into Tuesday morning. Hopefully we will get better clarification by tomorrow. What the models do agree on is that this is highly unlikely to be a one-day-and-done event. They both show better precipitation chances this week than we have had in a while!
My next update will be Sunday.